The Snowball Effect...

Everyone who knows Me, including my Hubby a few times, has questioned why I stay in my relationship with him when I seem to find it so unbearable a lot of time. I don't know that I have ever given them a satisfactory answer, but I'll try to now- if You will just indulge me for another little while.

Firstly and most importantly, I stay because I love him and our children. Don't ever doubt me when I say that. But sometimes I stay because I have been with him for fifteen years and he is all that I know anymore. I stay because it's easier than admitting that We've Failed. And I stay because I want it to get better. It has to get better eventually, doesn't it? Please don't tell me that we are no closer to getting to the end of the shit that's blocking the light at the end of the tunnel than we were when we first started out. Don't tell me that it's only gotten worse, and not better, in the last five or ten years for Nothing.

It's depressing enough when he gets into the car every afternoon and doesn't even acknowledge me unless I prompt him to say hello. I can't remember the last time that he asked me what I did during the day. What I don't tell everybody is that I'm not afraid of leaving. What I'm really afraid of is staying; especially if this is how it's going to be forever.

I don't want to lie next to a stranger for the next forty years. I don't want to share the bed and nothing else. I don't want to believe that he's only still here for the kids and not for Me at all. I don't want to wake up one morning and be old and find him gone and think that I've wasted my Life chasing something that wasn't even possible. Not from the start.

Everything was against the odds. I've said it before so I'll say it again; but we didn't even start going out until After we had a child together. But it wasn't always bad, either, even if it was a rocky start.

In the beginning, just before our eldest Son turned two, it was pretty fantastic, actually. I was almost twenty one. Neither of us had a job, except for the casual parenting we did on the side, and so we were both still living at home with our parents. To put it mildly, my Parent's weren't too thrilled that we had reunited- if you could even call it that. I had just been dumped by my Bastard Ex and my Mother was worried that I was just jumping from one disaster to the next. She even advised me not to sleep with my Hubby for a while, but I just laughed at her suggestion. What was the point of Looking before I Leapt in this scenario? What was the point of waiting for sex when we already had a child together?

I should probably point out somewhere that my Son and his father have always had a relationship, even when he- his parents- didn't, except that they didn't meet until our Son was almost six weeks old, and it only happened then, at all, because I forced the situation upon him. I'll tell that story another time, just know that my Son's grandparents, aunt and uncles had all met him before his own father had- they accepted us before he did- which was a part of the reason why my parents were so thrilled to learn of our 'new' relationship- as to them he had always been totally neglectful of his fatherly responsibilities right from the beginning- rather than merely (and completly) in denial of them. And they are two different things; believe me...

When we got 'back' together, for the first time Ever with Anybody I finally got to experience the feeling of Someone really reciprocating my feelings. He really did love me in the beginning. He called me his 'special' and his 'soul mate'. He came over every day to visit me and our Son while everyone else was at work. He'd walk to the shops to buy us hamburgers for lunch while I waited with our sleeping son. We spent every spare moment together and when he kissed me goodbye every afternoon as he left for home it was all I could do to let him leave without first dragging him back into the bedroom that I shared with our son.

I started staying over at his parent's house three or four nights a week, and we played happy families together while our Son slept in the portable cot beside his bed. We had no bills, no money troubles, and free babysitting on tap- and we were happy. We looked forward to the days when his parents had to work late so we could spend more time in bed together. We went out to pubs and watched bands and we liked to get drunk and fuck each other with a heat I've never felt with any other person. And we probably would have stayed this way forever- if we'd ever been given the choice...

It was his mother who found the small two bedroom house for us to rent that she filled with all the necessary furniture and crockery. At one point I can even remember looking around my kitchen and realising that the only thing that I had actually bought and paid for, myself, was the plastic soup ladle. Everything else was donated by some family member or another- as they acquired better furniture we received their hand-me-downs. My mother bought our first week's worth of groceries, while his mother paid all the deposits on our utilities and rental bond; and then They All gently pushed us out the door- me, my Hubby and our then three year old Son.

I think his mother said at the time that this was either going to make us or break us. Well, we are still together, but as to whether we have 'made it' I am less certain. That little house next to the Social Club was the scene of our first real fight- the first of many that never got resolved and snow-balled into the next argument. We still argue today, a different house and twelve years later, about the same issues and feelings that never got resolved when we first lived together.

When we moved to This house I really thought we could somehow leave most of the ill-feelings behind. How naive of Me...

I hate it when he sometimes piles the pillows as a barrier between us at night. I hate it when he talks nicer to the strangers he meets at the pub than he does to me. But most of all- today- I hate the lack of intimacy and communication between us; but I'm as much to blame for that when I can give him the silent treatment for days when I feel he's been ignoring me. It suits him down to the ground. I can tell.

I can't tell him any of his. I've tried and he insists that he doesn't know what I am going on about- but that's just because I'm being that weird Spastic Bitch, his terminology, on purpose again. I hate being afraid to talk to him about how I'm feeling. I know he'd rather it if I was indifferent as he is but I can't be that person. I can't be like him. I'd rather be mental than indifferent. Anyday. And I can't help it if I'm too clever for him. I can't dumb it down any more than I already do.

That's whats wrong. The trouble is- without stating the obvious- that we are totally different people. We think and need differently. Even though in my heart I know he loves me he rarely shows it, not unless he's reasonably drunk, and even then the affection only lasts until the hangover begins. I receive a perfunctory kiss morning and night, unless I'm really in the Bad Books, but for the rest of the time I creep around the house and secretly crave his attention and affection; especially at those times when I am angry or acting dismissively towards him.

His friend's are only half-joking when they say he is under my thumb- but that is exactly where he'd be if I could only pin him down for long enough. I'm afraid most of the time that he will leave me; most likely for somebody else. But most of all I'm jealous that he has a life outside these walls and I don't. And that is why it hurts Me so much when he doesn't often try and make me feel a part of his. I think the real truth is that he's getting too embarrassed to be seen with me in public...

But You'll have to wait til the next post- where I'll tell you a little story to illustrate this fact.

And then You can decide it for yourself...